Laura Does Chicago

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I started a post entitled “Laura does Dallas,” but it sat on my desktop instead of getting finished and posted on Blogger, and now I’m no longer in Dallas… I’ve traded it in for Chicago. Woo! So to catch you all up to speed…

After a fabulous fourth of July weekend (in which I flew halfway across the country for a second date with a guy I met the week before – yes, I am bold) and an amazing 25th birthday (in which I celebrated reaching my 50×25 goal by drinking tons of craft beer and celebrating with so many wonderful people, including the lovely Karen), I’m now settling down into my new life of hotel living and restaurant dining. My days of sleeping in my own bed, using my own gym, having a regular schedule, and bringing my own healthy lunches to work are over – it’s now all restaurants, all the time. Let the pound-packing begin! Ummm… no. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am determined not to gain the Consulting 15 this time around!

My firm sponsors a “fitness league” using Introplay, which is a pretty neat tool that assigns different point values to any workouts that you might do. The winner of the fitness league gets an iPad, which is a pretty neat prize. I’d love to win one (I’d like an iPad in general, but not badly enough to pay $500 or whatever for one… my netbook and Droid do 99% of what the iPad would do), but the competition is motivating me more than anything else. When signups went out, my response? “In it to win it!” Now let’s see if I can stick to that.

The league was supposed to start yesterday, and I drank gallons of sangria this weekend in preparation for burning it all off today (i.e. sangria tasting at bar on Friday night, all-you-can-drink sangria brunch for a bridal shower on Saturday, second all-you-can-drink sangria brunch to celebrate my friend Joe’s first triathlon on Sunday). However, they sent the link to sign up for the league out a few days late, so they decided to push back the start date until Friday 7/23. Without that motivation, I came home last night from dinner and decided that there was no need to go to the gym since the league wasn’t starting. Dumb! I actually have plenty of other motivation as well: I’m going back to Minneapolis this weekend to meet Minnesota Boy’s friends as we go out on a pontoon boat all day Saturday (hello, bikini) and go tubing all day Sunday (hello, second bikini). In case you’re wondering, I sent this eCard to MN Boy to tell him how I really feel:

I fly home from Minneapolis on Tuesday night, only to take a 6am flight the next day for Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. Less than 8 hours at home, which is definitely not enough time to work out and get into shape for my bro’s wedding there on Friday! I am really hoping there is a gym at the resort to offset all the pina coladas and daiquiris I intend to drink.

Anyway, this morning I did make some progress: I woke up at 5:30am so I could hit the hotel gym. 10 minutes of cardio + 20 minutes of weight lifting + 5 minutes of rowing = not bad. The gym at the boutique hotel where I’m staying was small but nice; however, I totally forgot how to use the all-in-one adjustable weight training machine. I made up some exercises as I went along, but it has definitely been way too long since I’ve been working out my arms! When I get some free time, I’ll try looking up some good stuff to do, but for today, I mostly just used the dumbbells and contented myself with that.

Chia did an interesting post a few weeks ago on Sparkpeople, and I commented that I’ve never been good with food logging, because once I work out, I have a tendency to then eat extra calories to make up for the workout! I think this system of logging my workouts but NOT logging my food is going to work out better for me. What about all you readers – do you track your food/exercise? If so, how do you do it?

I do track my food intake and my exercise. If I don’t track, then I eat like a pig. Tracking makes me conscious of what I’m doing. I use a computer program called DietPower to track both food and exercise.

I just wanted to say that, according to Facebook/Four-Square check-ins, it looks like you’ve been in Minneapolis quite a bit! Holla!!! Hope you’re enjoying your time here. :)

I’m with you in that if I track my food, I end up “justifying’ why I should eat more. It totally doesn’t work for me.

I’m more interested in covering my food groups to make sure I’m getting enough of everything, so what I do is draw an impromptu pyramid every morning in a notebook. Throughout the day, I shade in which food groups I ate from… I use that to judge what I should be eating more of (and probably less of), but it’s nothing too official. It makes me feel better knowing that I’m covering the basics rather than fretting over calories or anything too menial. Also works pretty well for if you’re dining out; you might not know calories, but you do know food groups.